Happy Halloween MMO Style

Spook-gineer

It’s my favorite time of year again! Halloween! Which is probably evident since one of my first posts about 10 years ago was just before Halloween and I pretty much cover Halloween events in any game I’m tooling around in when that time of year comes around again.

So much spook, so much fun!

This year instead of having my head stuck ostrich style in only one game I’m actually straddling two games instead. I’m slacking in Guild Wars 2 and actually accomplishing stuff in Elder Scrolls Online.

ESO

In ESO we’ve been doing the Witches Festival thing. In the first couple days of the event I completed the achievements to purchase that awesome house I’ve been waiting to get the whole year. A big thank you goes out to Vinny and El Duderino! I could not have done it without their help and I’m really, really grateful.

Why might you ask? Well the Exorcised Coven Cottage is totally worth the gold and the effort. Spooky sounds, mist all over the place and a pond you just know is teeming with wildlife… probably… It’s the perfect setting for Halloween hijinks.

After going through and doing the main story line for the Aldmeri Dominion I managed to get some pretty cool effects for the place as well. For those curious it was that glowy skull you get from getting all the way into the fourth zone of the AD quest line and the brazier. Totally worth it to make your place look creepy cool. There’s some great resources out there on where to find what achievement furniture. The stories are totally worth doing, you get skill points for the char you do it on, and the housing items are awesome and reasonably priced so all in all it’s a win/win.

PS if you want to get 100 plunder skulls relatively fast and you don’t mind waiting 5 minutes at a time, camp a world boss. They’re on a 5 min respawn timer and you can hang out getting the requisite skulls pretty fast. If you have a high dps toon, pick a world boss right next to a delve. Run in, kill the delve boss, run back out and kill the world boss, rinse and repeat.

Skull drops are on a 5 minute timer so you can’t just camp the delve bosses and get them when those guys respawn since they’re on a much shorter respawn timer. If you’re doing it for xp and skulls this can be a better method, but if you’re just semi afk and messing around, the world bosses are a great option.

Public dungeons are another great place to get skulls from the bosses there because you pretty much get one from each boss since they’re on a fat respawn timer and far enough apart. Keep in mind though that if it’s a popular public dungeon you may end up losing out on a boss to folks who get there before you do.

That’s pretty much why I suggested going for world bosses as the first option, because you can pretty much just hang out with your homies and chat it up on Discord while you wait for the bosses. Granted it’s not the most exciting thing to do, but to be honest, sitting in the queue waiting for dungeons isn’t all that much better especially on the days where the queue is pretty much pointless as too many people are trying to use it.

Keep in mind though if you want to get that one sweet gold skull from each type of boss, you do have to do each type of boss, BUT if you don’t really care about that kind of thing, then don’t cause it’s not a big deal. The only reason to do the other content would be to get the Dremora armor motifs but since those are dropping steadily in price on the guild stores there’s no reason to slug through stuff you don’t want to do, when you can just use you’re ill gotten gains from murder hobo’ing across Tyria to buy it off someone else.

This is pretty much me applying my F budget to gaming. If I don’t give an F, I’m not doing it. I don’t have time to waste doing content I don’t want to do.

Speaking of content though, I have managed to gather enough tickets to get the first feather for the “Exclusive Indrik” mount they’re dangling at people. Kind of happy about that, and I’ll probably milk a few more tickets out of that event so that I can do as little as possible during some of the other events.

In getting back to my f-budget, I’m not sure if I’ll have access to Clockwork City by the time the next event comes up, I haven’t bought that DLC and I’m probably going to let my ESO Plus run out. The Undaunted event is also not something that I have interest in since I don’t have fun doing dungeons. Hey at least in ESO I have done them. Serious! I even did a couple of raids and some veteran dungeons as a healer no less. Though I can’t really say that I enjoyed them enough to want to do more, so I don’t really do them.

While I do have to say that even though you can get some fun loot and housing items out of the witches festival, it’s no where near as entertaining as either the Winters Day thing or the Jesters Festival. It’s just roam around and kill stuff looking like a skelly. The skelly IS pretty cool, but it’s not the same as eating so much candy that you puke on the auctioneer. Not that the bankers in ESO deserve that kind of treatment outside that one Altmer in Alinor. You know who you are.

GW2

Anyways on to GW2. I’ve been keeping it patched and logging in to have access to the living story, but I really had not felt inspired to play GW2 again until the Mad King’s festival this year. I’m pretty sure it’s been almost a year to the day since we’d actively played GW2.

Over the weekend Vinny and I went from zeros to heroes using scrolls, xp boosters and the Mad King’s labyrinth. I think we also managed to sell off a load of candy before the auctioneer was glutted with folks doing the same thing.

The Mad King’s labyrinth is SUPER fun when you can get in a group that does all of the content including the legendary bosses. We were lucky enough to get in with one group with a chill commander that just hopped back and forth between buff banners while leaving a swath of destruction in our wake. I need a moment…. it was beautiful…..

Ok Moment over… the labyrinth makes for great loot and those bosses are actually a fun challenge instead of the usual nerve frying frustration. Then again the fine line between fun and the ‘I have sufficient achievements to prove that I’m an accomplished player’ is of course always tough to balance… Well not for me since I don’t give an F about achievements. I get the stuff I want and then enjoy poking at the really cool bugs. Because REASONS.

PS if you want to get the most out of the labyrinth… you’ll want to look for a map with either well geared players or a pretty big zerg to take on those bosses. If you are on a map with just a handful of folks just wait until someone pops a commander tag then you can pretty much just tag along. If you have a commander tag, then you may as well make it pay for it’s self by popping that puppy and enjoying the sweet sweet loot.

On getting back into GW2 I’ve noticed a lot of quality of life features in the game that I didn’t realize I missed until I spent more time actually playing it. There really is a reason why a lot of the innovations of GW2 are becoming industry standards and it’d be nice if a few more of their features were adopted across the board as well.

That however is a post unto it’s self for another day.

For now, happy halloweenie to anyone entering this dark corner of the internet. Remember your f-budgets, and just have fun out there.